Tales of a Designer

After All the Fun…

So I had a planned out post, and knew exactly what I wanted to write about until I stumbled across an article this morning, that made mention of an employer not hiring a graduating senior from college because of some information displayed on his Facebook profile. Now, I’m not going to say who’s wrong or right in this situation, however I will just give my overall input.

“I never really considered that employers would do something like that,” he said. “I thought they would just look at your résumé and grades.”

What I don’t understand, is that how naive people can really be sometimes with what is going on with the web. Now maybe I’m just biased because I spend the majority of my day (or life for that matter) on the web, so it’s easier for me to see. But come on, lets be real here, major employers have pull, and they will find out information if they want. Everyone knows that people, especially young people, put on this persona come interview time, so that they can win over the minds of the employer to think that they are strictly work oriented.

We obviously know that the employer will not be that naive to think that a freshly graduated college student didn’t have a life outside of classes. So they do their research, just like a person applying for a job would do their research on the company to find out the goods and bads. Now, is the employer wrong for doing research? That is hard to say, however, when you have sites like MySpace that don’t require a login to view profiles, that’s almost too easy to find out information about people. At the same time, what are they intentions of the employer, and how far will he actually go to gain information? That is the question that has to be answered in order to put a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ label on that.

Ok enough about the employer, lets get to the “mature” and newly graduated college student looking for a professional job. While you were in school, we understand that it was cool to register for all of these sites, and put up your most personal information in order to gain attention and have people say “wow, that’s really cool” or whatever. I know, I was there once, but it did not take me long at all to wise up. So why can’t other people? As much fun as it is uploading pictures of you smoking and drinking your weekends away, did you ever think that there could be downsides to that?

Do you realize that when you have profiles on sites like Facebook and MySpace, and when you add all those pictures and personal information about yourself, that you are allowing people to judge you before they really meet you? That profile is representing the person you are, and why would an employer want to hire some alcoholic person who so gladly posts pictures of him passed out at a party naked. Now it is easy for one to say they don’t care what other people think, but those people could be deciding how your near future will pan out. Aside from that, your parents could find that information too, and we don’t need to get into what parents would think.

When you start hearing such a buzz about all this Facebook and MySpace talk, it helps to think into things a little bit and not brush it off. As much as you think that your employer shouldn’t worry about your personal life, think again, because when you put out your personal life for everyone to see, it won’t just be your close friends looking at it, it’s available to the whole world.

My overall point is that in such an era dominated by the web/technology, you really can’t be naive to the fact that it is alot easier to find out information about people. I learned this the hard way after almost getting fired for a blog that I wrote, and how quickly I wised up. I’m not saying that young people shouldn’t use these sites, but know you are being judged based on what you add to your profile, and the sad part is, you are being judged with out even knowing or having a say-so to explain yourself. People need to wisen up a little bit. Don’t be as naive, because your future employer won’t be.